“A versatile main text that works well for both general humanities courses
and more advanced classes in architectural history.”
—Dr. David Seamon, Kansas State University
This widely acclaimed, beautifully illustrated survey of Western architecture is now fully
revised throughout, including essays on non-Western traditions. The expanded book vividly
examines the structure, function, history, and meaning of architecture in ways that are both
accessible and engaging.
Significant features of the third edition include:
• Increased global coverage, with new essays on Africa, Japan, China, India, Islamic
architecture, and the architecture of the Americas.
• A new chapter covering twenty-first century architecture.
• Updated coverage of sustainable and green architecture and its impact on design.
• Revised historical survey and expanded and illustrated timeline.
• Thoroughly revised and expanded art program, including more than 650 black and
white images–135 new to this edition, and more than 200 line art drawings created
by author Leland M. Roth. A new 32-page, full-color insert features more than 50
new color images.
Understanding Architecture continues to be the only text in the field to examine architecture
as a cultural phenomenon as well as an artistic and technological achievement with its
straightforward, two-part structure: The Elements of Architecture and The History and
Meaning of Architecture. Comprehensive and clearly written, Understanding Architecture is
a classic survey of architecture.
Leland M. Roth is Marion Dean Ross Professor of Architectural History Emeritus at the
University of Oregon at Eugene. Dr. Roth is the author of American Architecture: A History
(Westview Press), McKim, Mead & White, and other works.
Amanda C. Roth Clark received her Doctor of Philosophy from The University of
Alabama, completing her doctoral work on the topic of contemporary artists’ books. She
holds Master and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Oregon in the fields of
Western architectural history and Asian art. She is the daughter of Leland M. Roth.
Cover Image: Rafael Moneo, Museum of Roman Art, Mérida, Spain, 1980-1986. © Lluís Casals, Fotografia de Arquitectura.
Cover Design: Miguel Santana & Wendy Halitzer
CLARK
UNDERSTANDING
ARCHITECTURE
“Powerful and moving.”
—Judith Cushman-Hammer, Appalachian State University
ROTH
THIRD
EDITION
T H I R D
E D I T I O N
Understanding
Architecture
Its Elements, History, and Meaning
LELAND M. ROTH
AND
www.routledge.com
AMANDA C. ROTH CLARK
9780813349039-text_Layout 1 10/28/13 2:10 PM Page i
Understanding Architecture
Louis I. Kahn, The Phillips Exeter Library, Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, 1965–1971. A good example of what
Louis Kahn meant when he said “architecture is what nature cannot make.” Photo: Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
9780813349039-text_Layout 1 10/28/13 2:10 PM Page iii
Understanding
Architecture
Its Elements, History, and Meaning
T HIRD E DITION
Leland M. Roth
and
Amanda C. Roth Clark
New York London
9780813349039-text_Layout 1 10/29/13 10:39 AM Page iv
First published 2014 by Westview Press
Published 2018 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2014 by Leland M. Roth and Amanda C. Roth Clark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Every effort has been made to secure required permissions for all text, images, maps, and other art
reprinted in this volume.
Design and composition by Trish Wilkinson
Set in 9.5-point Goudy Old Style
Photo research by Sue Howard
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Leland M.
Understanding architecture: its elements, history, and meaning / Leland M. Roth and
Amanda C. Roth Clark.—Third edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8133-4903-9 (pbk.)
1. Architecture. 2. Architecture—History. I. Title.
NA2500.R68 2013
2013028188
720.9—dc23
ISBN 13: 9780813349039 (pbk)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
xi
xxxv
1
Part I
The Elements of Architecture
1
Architecture: The Art of Shaping of Space
9
2
“Commoditie”: Building Functions
21
Function, 22
3
“Firmeness”: Structure, or How Does the Building Stand Up?
33
Elements of the Oldest Architecture, 36
The Elements of Lithic (Stone) Structure: The Post and Lintel, 39
The Classical Orders, 42
Structural Frames, 44
The Arch, 46
Vaults, 47
Domes, 48
Trusses, 53
Space Frames and Geodesic Domes, 54
Shells, 54
Suspension Structures, 56
Building Technology and Risk, 65
Structure as Cultural Expression, 66
4
“Delight”: Seeing Architecture
69
Visual Perception, 69
Proportion, 75
Scale, 76
Rhythm, 79
v
vi
Contents
Texture, 82
Light, 87
Color, 87
Ugliness, 91
Ornament, 91
5
Architecture and Sound
103
Hearing Buildings, 103
Sound: Focusing and Dispersing, 104
Sound: Lingering and Echoing, 105
Shaping Early Church Music, 107
The Synchronous Development of Orchestras and Orchestral Halls, 111
6
Architecture: Part of the Natural Environment
117
Buildings, Sun, and Heat, 117
Buildings and the Wind, 126
The Chemistry of Buildings, 131
7
The Architect: From High Priest to Profession
135
8
Architecture, Memory, and Economics
153
Economics and Historic Preservation, 153
Chronology
160
Part II
The History and Meaning of Architecture
9
The Beginnings of Architecture: From Caves to Cities
165
Early Hominids, 165
Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, 167
Neolithic Dwellings and Structures, 171
Western European Megaliths, 177
From Villages to Cities, 182
The Invention of Architecture, 185
10 The Architecture of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt
Mesopotamia: The Land Between the Rivers, 187
Egypt: The Gift of the Nile, 194
The Landscape of Egypt, 194
The Culture of Egypt, 196
Egyptian History, 198
Egyptian Funerary Architecture, 200
Egyptian Tombs, 206
The Temple of Amon at Karnak and Other Egyptian Temples, 207
187
Contents
vii
Egyptian Villages and Houses, 212
Late Egyptian Architecture, 215
An Architecture for Eternity, 217
11 Greek Architecture
219
The Geography of Greece, 219
Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, 220
The Greek Character, 224
The Greek Polis, 225
Greek City Planning, 226
Domestic Architecture, 230
Public Buildings, 230
The Greek Temple, 234
Hellenistic Architecture, 244
An Architecture of Excellence, 247
12 Roman Architecture
249
Roman History, 249
The Roman Character, 251
Roman Religion and the Roman Temple, 252
Roman Urban Planning, 254
The Enclosure and Manipulation of Space, 257
Domestic Architecture, 263
Public Buildings, 266
Later Roman “Baroque” Architecture, 272
An Architecture of Universality, 272
E S S AY 1: Indian Architecture
275
13 Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture
283
The Transformation of the Roman Empire, 283
Early Christian Architecture, 285
The Movement of Peoples, 293
Monasticism, 295
Byzantine Architecture, 295
An Architecture of Heaven, 305
E S S AY 2: Islamic Architecture
Islamic Architecture and the West, 307
Islam Develops, 307
The Mosque, 308
Secular Islamic Buildings, 309
Islamic Architecture in Spain, 311
Islamic Architecture in India, 312
307
viii Contents
14 Medieval Architecture
315
The Early Middle Ages, 316
The High Middle Ages: Gothic Architecture, 337
15 Renaissance Architecture
365
Italy in the Fifteenth Century, 365
The Renaissance Patron, 367
Humanism, 367
Roman Building Scale Re-achieved: Brunelleschi’s Dome, 368
Vitruvius and Ideal Form, 371
Brunelleschi and Rationally Ordered Space, 373
Idealized Forms and the Centrally Planned Church, 377
Alberti’s Latin Cross Churches, 379
Bramante and the New Saint Peter’s, Rome, 381
Residential Architecture: Merchant Prince Palaces, 388
Mannerism: Renaissance Perfection in Play, 393
The Palazzo del Te, 394
Late Italian Renaissance Gardens, 397
The Renaissance Exported, 400
An Architecture of Humanist Ideals, 406
E S S AY 3: Ancient Architecture in the Americas
409
Central America, 409
16 Baroque and Rococo Architecture
415
An Architecture for the Senses, 416
Baroque Churches in Rome, 417
An Architecture of Emotional Power, 418
The Central Plan Modified: Bernini’s Churches, 422
Borromini’s Churches, 424
Guarini’s Churches, 429
Baroque Scale, 431
French Baroque: Versailles, 434
English Baroque, 438
The Baroque Staircase, 442
Rococo Architecture: The End of the Baroque, 447
An Architecture of Artifice, 453
E S S AY 4: Chinese Architecture
455
17 The Origins of Modernism: Architecture in the
Age of Enlightenment, 1720–1790
The Emergence of Art and Architectural History, 466
A Rational Architecture: Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, 469
“Speaking Architecture,” 470
463
Contents ix
Designing the City, 472
The English Garden: “Consult the Genius of the Place”, 483
Eclecticism and the Architecture of Revolutions, 489
The Industrial Revolution, 492
An Architecture of Rationality, 493
E S S AY 5: Japanese Architecture
497
18 The Roots of Modernism: The Nineteenth Century
505
Neoclassicism, 506
The Gothic Revival, 509
Egyptian Revival, 512
Creative Eclecticism, 516
The Architecture of the New Industrialism, 521
Industry and Urban Growth, 525
Reaction to the Machine, 531
Academic Eclecticism and The École des Beaux-Arts, 537
E S S AY 6: African Architecture
549
19 Versions of Modern Architecture, 1914–1970
557
An Architecture of Its Own Time, 557
Creative Eclecticism (Redux), 561
National Romanticism, 563
Modernism: Phase One, 1914–1940, 566
A Counter-Architecture to Rationalism: German Expressionism in the 1920s, 568
Functional Utilitarianism and the Rise of International Modernism, 571
Modernism: Phase Two, 1945–1970, 582
Modernism: Form Follows Function—or the Other Way Around?, 584
Brutalism: The Rough Edge of Modernism, 603
An Architecture of Perfect Function: Success or Failure?, 605
20 The Expansion of Modernism:
From the Twentieth Century into the Twenty-First
Postmodernism Emerges, 611
Late Modernism or Neo-Modernism, 639
Sculpted (Shaped) Modernism, 630
High Tech, 632
Megastructures, 633
Offices Above the Clouds, 636
The International Architect, 639
Resurgent Expressionism, 641
Deconstructivism, 644
Critical Regionalism, 647
Building Communities, 652
609
x
Contents
21 Into the Twenty-First Century
Suggested Readings
Notes
Glossary
Index
657
689
685
711
725
Chapter 9
The Beginnings of Architecture
From Caves to Cities
R
Early man’s respect for the dead, itself an
expression of fascination with his powerful images
of daylight fantasy and nightly dream, perhaps had
an even greater role than more practical needs in
causing him to seek a fixed meeting place and
eventually a continuous settlement. Mid the uneasy
wanderings of Paleolithic man, the dead were the
first to have a permanent dwelling: a cave, a mound
marked by a cairn, a collective barrow. . . . Urban
life spans the historic space between the earliest
burial ground for the dawn man and the final
cemetery, the Necropolis, in which one civilization
after another has met its end.
—Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961
R
H
uman beings, among other animals, seem
unique in the world. Eons ago, our hominid ancestors learned to control fire, to recognize a social
link with each other, to maintain a bond with the
remains of their dead, to engage in symbolic thought,
and to fashion symbolic images and objects. We
became persistent in our endeavors, developed the
power of speech, devised codes of morals, and nurtured an ability to care for the helpless and aged. We
also learned how to build, to create artificial environments that made our lives safer, more enjoyable,
and more psychologically rewarding.
The exact time that we humans learned to build
may never be known with certainty, for our earliest
constructions were probably fashioned from organic
materials—branches, brush, hides, and such—that
quickly returned to the earth without a trace. Tantalizing examples of what so readily disappeared are
the remains of dwellings at a site called Monte
Verde, in present-day Chile. After being abandoned about 13,600 years ago, these dwellings were
preserved because they were soon covered by water
that quickly became a bog, sealing the building remains and preventing oxygen from getting to the
wood, leather, and fiber materials, thereby stopping
their decomposition.1 They are, however, far from
being the oldest human habitations.
Architecture is shelter, but it is also a symbol and
a form of communication; as Sir Herbert Read observed, all art is “a mode of symbolic discourse.”2
Architecture is the crystallization of ideas, a physical
representation of human thought and aspiration, a
record of the beliefs and values of the culture that
produces it. In an introductory study such as this,
we must start at the beginning, but this raises the
intriguing question of exactly when it was that humans began to develop ways of thinking and of
making things to convey symbolic thought. We
need to move well back from the period of recorded
history, to the dim ages when the ancestors of Homo
sapiens appeared. In doing so, we uncover traces of
the origins of human society and human institutions. We discover, too, that what we build is shaped
only in part by the private need to provide for a particular functional use; architecture may have been
built from the earliest times as a symbol of communal social values. Architecture accommodates psychological as well as physiological needs of the
human family, whose basic social institutions are at
the very least a million years old. Thus, the strictly
utilitarian or functional considerations of modern
architecture defined during the last century are only
the most inconsequential part of the broad social
and cultural functions that architecture fulfills.
Early Hominids
The study of early protohumans is a rapidly expanding field, with new discoveries occurring continuously.3 The first hominids appeared at least 5 million
years ago in central Africa. The early human ancestors Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus
165
166
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
anamensis were most likely forest dwellers, consuming
a vegetable diet of fruit and leaves. Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what is now Ethiopia, and Australopithecus anamensis in modern-day Kenya. About a million
years later, Australopithecus afarensis appeared, named
for the Afar region in Ethiopia, where the skeleton
of the female affectionately named “Lucy” was uncovered. Judging from the scattered skeletal remains
of this species found so far, the males stood 4.5 feet
(137 cm) high, with the females shorter. These protohumans lived on the warm equatorial savannas
and probably had no pressing need for shelter; nor,
apparently, did they control or use fire.
About half a million years later, roughly 3.5 million years ago, a parallel species, called Australopithecus africanus, developed in what is now South
Africa. This hominid deserves particular mention
because of a jasperite pebble about 2.4 inches
(6 cm) in diameter. Through natural, geological
processes, the piece of jasperite seems shaped like
the face of this species. What makes this small stone
so special is that it almost certainly came from a
source nearly 20 miles (32 km) from where it was
found in 1925 in a cave at Makapansgat, South
Africa. The evidence suggests that the pebble was
picked up by a member of Australopithecus africanus
and kept perhaps because of the perceived resemblance to the hominid’s facial features, and then
perhaps was abandoned some distance away. This
suggests the very beginnings of symbolic thought
and self-awareness.
About 2 million years ago, there appeared a new
species of early hominid, called Homo habilis, or
“handy man,” and this scientific name choice indicates that these individuals were much more like
modern humans than the preceding “southern
apes.” Members of Homo habilis clearly made stone
tools (and no doubt many others of wood), carrying
their tool-making materials over long distances.
They moved out of the forest into more open
savannas—or, perhaps more accurately, the forests
diminished in size in the drier, cooler climate that
was part of the first ice age in the Northern Hemisphere. These hominids began to eat meat, a dietary change that greatly accelerated the physical
and complex social changes required in hunting.
The brains of this species increased in size, allowing
individuals to hold a larger mental map of the territories they traversed and to track game.
Around 1.25 million years ago, a new descendant
subspecies appeared in the Olduvai area of Tanzania.
This group was given the name Homo erectus in
reference to its clearly erect posture and bipedal locomotion.4 Because of their mental planning abilities
and tool-making skills, members of Homo erectus
were unlike any creature that had lived before, for
they were not genetically or physically limited to
living in one fixed climatological area. They could
control their immediate climate, capturing fire from
natural sources such as lightning strikes. They could
migrate, and did, gradually moving northward out of
central Africa into southern Asia and China, and
into Europe, where a variant now called Homo
heidelbergensis emerged [9.1]. Evidence of hearth sites
has been uncovered in South Africa, Israel, China,
and Europe, variously dated from 700,000 to 300,000
years ago; each revealed evidence of cooking. In the
Escale Cave at Saint-Estève-Janson, France, evidence was found of five hearths and reddened heataltered earth dating to about 200,000 BP.5 Use of fire
allowed for roasting meat and plant material, opening
up new nutritional sources for the early humans; the
cooked proteins and complex carbohydrates in turn
encouraged rapid new brain development. Around
such fires, protected and warmed at night in these
colder northern climates, early humans gathered and
stronger social bonds formed. The light of night fires
meant the workday was no longer limited to sunlight
hours. Certainly by day, and perhaps at night by the
light of these fires, Homo erectus made bifaced stonecutting tools and began to form aesthetic judgments
in the process of striking off the last additional flakes
of the stone core to arrive at more pleasing mentally
preconceived shapes. In fact, the movement of protohumans into Europe would not have been possible
without the use and control of fire, for soon after
Homo erectus arrived in Europe, the second great age
of glaciation—the Günz glaciation—began, lasting
from roughly 1 million to 900,000 years ago. With
skills in tool-making, hunting, and the resultant
knowledge of leather-making, Homo heidelbergensis
(the European variant of erectus) survived this ice age
and the next, the Mindel glaciation, which lasted
from about 700,000 to 600,000 years ago, as well as
the fourth ice age, the Riss glaciation, which lasted
from 300,000 to 150,000 years ago.
Terra Amata, Nice, France
As Homo erectus groups moved into the more challenging climates of Europe, they had to find or
make their own shelter. Because earlier excavations
had turned up Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) tools in
Nice on France’s Mediterranean coast, anthropologist Henry de Lumley watched closely in October
1965 as bulldozers cut through ancient sand banks
to prepare a site for new high-rise apartments.6
When the excavation work uncovered tools, he
had the work halted to allow for intensive and
painstaking excavations. As a result, de Lumley and
Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens
167
9.1. Map of Europe, 30,000–5,000 BP. The broken line offshore shows the ice age shoreline when sea levels were 300 feet
(100 m) lower than in the twentieth century.
his associates discovered what turned out to be a
springtime camping ground for a group of Homo
erectus (or perhaps Homo heidelbergensis) hunters
who visited this spot annually over a period of several decades, sometime around 400,000 to 300,000
years ago. At this spot, since called Terra Amata
(Latin for “beloved land”), de Lumley found the remains of the oldest known fabricated shelter—
what, perhaps by extension, might be called the
first architecture. There were remains of twentyone dwellings, eleven of which were rebuilt on the
same spot year after year on the top of an ancient
sand dune above the primeval Mediterranean
coast. Roughly oval in plan and measuring about
26 to 49 feet (7.9 to 14.9 m) in length by 13 to 20
feet (4.0 to 6.1 m) in width, the dwellings had side
walls made of a palisade of branches 3 inches
(7.6 cm) in diameter and pushed into the sand
[9.2]. Against the edges were piled rocks, some of
which were 1 foot (0.3 m) in diameter. Down the
center were posts up to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, although the roof they supported left no trace
(perhaps the side branches leaned against a center
ridge beam supported by the posts). In each shelter
was a central hearth, with a windbreak of stones on
the northwest side, the direction from which prevailing winds still blow in Nice. In one hut were
indications of a toolmaker, for around a stone stool
were chips and flakes of rock, some of which could
be reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle to form the original cobble.
That a group of Homo erectus people returned
to Terra Amata year after year suggests a regular
hunting cycle, but even more important is the
hearth. The fire suggests the gathering of the group,
the establishment of a community. Pieces of ocher
found within the huts suggest that the inhabitants
used these to draw on their skin. In using fire and
building artificial shelters, these human ancestors
took control of their environment, shaping it to
their own convenience and requirements. The first
steps toward architecture—the deliberate shaping
of the living environment—had been taken.
Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens
Out of the late erect humans such as Homo heidelbergensis came two sibling species (according to some
paleontologists)—Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and
Homo sapiens sapiens. The Neanderthals appeared
168
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
9.2. Terra Amata, Homo erectus dwelling, Nice, France, c. 400,000–300,000 before present (BP). Reconstructed from holes
left by decayed wooden structural members and by the rocks placed around the perimeter, this represents the earliest known
human-constructed dwelling. From Scientific American, May 1969.
about 200,000 years ago in Europe, and Homo sapiens
sapiens appeared in Africa a little later, around
130,000 years ago. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
(“Neanderthal man”) was so called because of the
first remains found in 1856 in the Neander valley
(Thal) in Germany. Though shorter and much more
muscular than Homo sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals
were not the brutish, hunched figures once imagined; it just happened that one of the first full skeletons found was that of a stooped, arthritic older man.
The Neanderthals spread throughout upper Africa,
Europe, and the Near East. There have been numerous finds of their work, including many stone tools
of the Mousterian tool-making tradition they developed, but only scant finds of remains of built structures. For the most part, early Neanderthals seem to
have been cave dwellers, as at Le Moustier, a rock
shelter in the Dordogne, France.
Through Neanderthal burials, however, much
has been learned of their communal existence and
something of their perception of life itself. The oldest
deliberate Neanderthal burials found so far have
been at Kaprina, Croatia, dating about 130,000 years
ago. The question arises as to whether burial implies
some form of early religious thought or practice. At
La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, the remains of a
very elderly man, buried carefully with stone tools
laid around him and with a bison leg placed on top
of his body, was discovered in 1908. A great majority
of the other burials have revealed bodies laid out on
an east-west axis, suggesting perhaps an alignment
with the movement of the sun. Perhaps the most
suggestive is the burial in a cave at Shanidar, in the
mountains of Iraq. Tests of the soil found around the
male skeleton revealed that he had been interred
resting on a bed of pine boughs and flowers and was
then covered with blossoms of grape hyacinth, bachelor’s buttons, hollyhock, and groundsel.7 Another
man buried in the same cave had a congenitally deformed arm that would have made hunting impossible, and yet he had lived a long life, supported by
his familial group. This evidence, along with the old
man buried at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, suggests a
complex Neanderthal social structure in which the
old and the infirm were valued, nurtured, and sustained. The flowers of Shanidar suggest that the Neanderthals imagined that life continued somehow
after death, in a renewed cycle or on a different
plane; the flowers indicate that the Neanderthals
had come to think in symbolic terms.
Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens
Dwellings of Homo Sapiens
The Neanderthals as a distinct genetic species began
to die out about 40,000 years ago, during the last ice
age, the Würm glaciation. For a time, as burial evidence in caves in Israel and elsewhere indicates,
they lived side by side with Homo sapiens sapiens,
who had moved northward from Africa around
40,000 years ago. But the Neanderthals were dying
out, surviving in northwestern Spain up to 27,000
years ago. Some scholars suggest that the two species
interbred. Whatever the case, Neanderthals were
replaced by modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Various new tool-making traditions were perfected
by Homo sapiens sapiens, or Cro-Magnon people, the
name derived from a site in France where their remains were first identified. These new point-flaking
technologies succeeded each other comparatively
rapidly—the Perigordian, the Aurignacian, the more
delicate Gravettian and Solutrean, and finally the
Magdalenian—all falling into what is called the
upper Paleolithic period, the Old Stone Age.
A number of dwelling sites of early humans (both
Neanderthals and later Cro-Magnons) have been
uncovered across Europe. Those of eastern Europe
show a type of house that was apparently typical for
that region. Round, perhaps domed or conical in
shape, these houses had internal frames of wood covered presumably with hides; the dwellings were
braced at the bottom with massive mammoth bones,
often with rings of mammoth skulls locked together
[9.3]. Remains of such houses have been found in
several locations in Moravia (Czech Republic)—at
169
Ostrava-Petřkovice and Dolní Věstonice—and also
in the Ukraine in Russia, near the Dniester River.
The Ukraine site revealed superimposed habitation
levels going back as far as 46,000 years ago, with the
most recent dating from about 12,000 years ago.
These dwellings may have accommodated extended
family groups, for some houses measured roughly 30
feet (9.1 m) in diameter. Both Moravian sites were
occupied by successive generations from roughly
29,000 to 24,000 years ago. These dwellings were
nearly the same as those found in the Ukraine. They
were ringed with massive bones and measured about
20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter; one house, however,
measured about 50 by 20 feet (15.2 by 6.1 m) and
had five hearths. These early Homo sapiens clearly
knew how to create fire quickly and at will, for they
left flints and iron pyrites used to strike sparks; one
piece of pyrite found in a Belgian cave had a groove
in it from repeated striking.
The site at Dolní-Věstonice proved to be especially important archaeologically, for set apart from
the five residential huts was a sixth house built into
the side of a hill, with a larger hearth covered with
an earthen dome. Lying about on the floor was
ample evidence of what was fabricated there—
hundreds of bits of fired clay, some bearing the
fingerprints of the primeval potter. Nor was pure
clay alone used for the implements; rather, it was
clay mixed with crushed bone, perhaps the oldest
example of what might be called industrial production in which two dissimilar substances were deliberately intermixed to create a new and stronger
artificial material.
9.3. Cro-Magnon dwelling, Ukraine, c. 46,000–14,000 BP. Such dwellings, some of them 30 feet (9.1 m) across, had
masses of mammoth bones piled around the perimeter and apparently were covered with hides. From Scientific American,
June 1974.
170
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
Cro-Magnon humans, our Homo sapiens sapiens
ancestors, also buried their dead with elaborate ceremony, to judge by the intricate ivory and bead
jewelry and tools with which they were interred.
Perhaps they took leave of the dead with song, playing the bone flutes they left in the graves. But the
most compelling evidence of the intellectual capacity of these forefathers is found not in their huts,
stone tools, or burials but in the visual evidence they
left, the painting and sculpture they created. They
seem to have become aware of a cycle of life, perhaps perceiving a oneness with the cosmos, in
which male and female entities participated in the
renewal of life. Across Europe have been found
carved figures, described now as fertility figures, of
women with enlarged breasts and buttocks, most
with no clearly discernible faces. The oldest portable
art object uncovered so far is a mammoth-ivory statuette found in a cave at Hohlenstrin-Stadel, Germany. Standing about 12 inches (30 cm) high, it is
a human figure with a feline head. Dating to about
32,000 years ago, it depicts perhaps a shamanistic
figure wearing a mask. Some of the portable figures
are female images, small figures carved in stone or
ivory, such as the rounded so-called Venus found in
Willendorf, Austria, while others were mural art,
carved into the rock on the walls of caves. The most
imposing and intriguing of these is the Venus of
Laussel, France, carved 22,000 to 18,000 years ago
in the rock of the cave wall. She raises aloft in her
right hand a horn marked with thirteen grooves.
Even more impressive than these carved figures
are paintings discovered in caves in southern France
and northern Spain, which continue to be found as
recently as the closing decade of the twentieth century. The first were seen in 1879, when the daughter
of a Spanish nobleman, exploring a cave with her
father on his estate at Altamira, Spain, looked up
and saw the images of twenty-five bison, deer, boars,
and other animals painted on the cave ceiling. It
seemed at first impossible that images of such grace
in execution could be of the same date as the incredibly ancient remains found on the floor of the
caves. As other caves were discovered subsequently,
it became clear that the images were painted sometime between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Over the decades numerous other decorated
caves were discovered in southern France. Then, in
1940, perhaps the most famous cave of all was discovered, at Lascaux, France, in Dordogne at the
edge of the Massif Central above the Vézère River,
not far from Montignac.8 By the light of small lamps,
which in places left smudges on the walls of the
cave, Cro-Magnon humans had painted hundreds
of images of aurochs (prehistoric oxen), woolly rhi-
noceroses, prehistoric horses, deer, elk, and other
animals. The colors were achieved using pigments
of powdered minerals—iron oxide or ocher ranging
from bright red, orange, yellow to warm browns, and
manganese oxide (or charcoal) for black—often
packed in tubes made of hollowed-out bone. Some
pigments were left as powder and blown onto the
walls; others were mixed with animal fat, egg white,
or other liquids and brushed or daubed on with the
fingers. There is some evidence to suggest that
the higher portions of the cave “vault” were painted
from a wooden scaffold—architecture in the service
of art. The artists and their assistants fashioned images unsurpassed for clarity of outline, grace of form,
and sensitivity to perspective until the time of the
Greeks and Romans. A good representative example is the so-called Chinese Horse at Lascaux, in
which the outlines of the rear legs fade away as they
near the mass of the body to suggest the distance
from the legs in the foreground.
In the 1990s, two more caves were discovered
in France, untouched and unparalleled in the technical skill demonstrated in their animal imagery.
One was found in 1991 just below the sea cliffs
midway between Marseilles and Cassis on the Riviera coast. We need to remember that during the
last ice age, when so much water was locked up in
the polar ice caps, sea level was nearly 300 feet
(91 m) lower than it is today, and myriad coastal
Stone Age sites were later obliterated by the rising
sea. This Cosquer Cave, so called because of its discoverer, was protected because its mouth was lower
than the main body of the cave, so the rising sea
trapped air into the higher portion of the cave; the
abundant hand prints made with charcoal permitted radiocarbon dating to 27,000 years ago. Even
older, and so far the oldest mural painting discovered, is that in the Chauvet Cave, discovered in
1994 in the gorge of the Ardèche in southeast
France. Here the images have been securely dated
as having been made in a period extending from
32,500 to 32,100 years ago, with a second major
period of painting activity lasting from roughly
26,500 to 24,000 years ago.
The question that has puzzled anthropologists
since the discovery of these caves is why such striking and realistic images were painted. They were not
scribbled in idle moments on the ceilings of inhabited caves. Nor were the paintings opportunistic,
created during chance moments in easily accessible
places. Most images are found deep in the innermost recesses of special caves, in secluded chambers
reached only by arduous crawling. The lamps, pigments, and scaffold materials had to be carried into
the caves with care and deliberation. In some caves,
Neolithic Dwellings and Structures 171
there is evidence to suggest the practice of fertility
or initiation rites. Are these images of hunting
magic, in which the spirit of the animal is captured
and killed before the actual hunt, or are these images meant to impregnate the earth with the spirit
of the animal after the hunt to ensure its continued
survival? Perhaps they are spiritual images used in
shamanistic rituals communing with the animal
spirits.9 If this was hunting magic, why are there no
bones of the painted animals in the middens, the refuse piles adjacent to the settlements? Conversely,
images of reindeer, whose bones are found in human
settlements, are comparatively rare. Perhaps these
life-like images are the first human expression of
a redemptive endeavor, for something may have
seemed terribly wrong in the ecological balance perceived by the artists; perhaps the images were a
desperate attempt to propagate the huge animals
that were disappearing from the face of the earth.
The womb of mother earth was being carefully
impregnated with the images of the great disappearing beasts. Perhaps this is why the caves themselves
were never altered, the narrow openings never
widened, the difficult passages never made easy.
Cro-Magnon people seem not to have built sacred
buildings as such, at least not using permanent materials that might have come down to us; they seem
to have practiced their religion in the dark inner sacred sanctuaries of their earth mother.
Neolithic Dwellings and Structures
As mentioned, remains of dwellings incorporating
durable bone and stone have been discovered at
various sites in what is now Eastern Europe and the
Ukraine, ranging in date from 46,000 to 12,000
years ago. Clearer evidence of how organic materials
were likely used in dwelling construction was discovered in late 1975, not in Europe but at a site
called Monte Verde in southern Chile, in a village
complex built by humans moving into the Western
Hemisphere. Through extraordinary chance conditions at this particular village site, the organic materials used in construction—dwelling base timbers,
portions of the mammoth hide covers, and even
wood stakes and fiber cordage—survived for 13,000
years10 [9.4]. The village, apparently occupied over
several years, was abandoned when the nearby
creek changed course and subsequent rapid flooding
covered this ancient camp. The shelters, their wood
supports, the hide covering, and even the braided
cords that attached the skins to the wood frames
were remarkably well preserved due to the peat formation that quickly developed and encased the collapsed dwellings. This peat prevented oxygen from
coming into contact with the organic materials, and
the anaerobic environment prevented bacterial action and decay. When excavated in the late 1970s
and opened further in the 1980s, dwelling remains
and hearths indicated that a long extended structure, with interior hide partitions, had been constructed to house a group of about thirty people.
When the organic samples were radiocarbon-dated,
the astounding results yielded dates ranging from
14,800 to 13,800 years ago, making these the oldest
dwellings built of wood and skins to survive and be
uncovered so far. The chance preservation of these
wood and skin dwellings suggests that there must
have been untold numbers of such dwellings, built
over thousands of years in North and South America, almost all of which disappeared without a trace.
Beginning about 10,000 years ago (8000 BCE),
as the Würm glaciation ended and the ice gradually
retreated again, the harsh northern climate moderated. Lush forests gradually replaced tundra and
steppes. A new age had begun, the Neolithic or
New Stone Age, and humans increasingly settled
for extended periods and began to build more permanent settlements.
In some areas the old hunting and gathering
traditions lingered, as indicated by the remains of a
settlement at Lepenski Vir, dating from about 7,000
to 6,600 years ago (5000–4600 BCE), at a prime
fishing location on the Danube, in the Iron Gates
region in present-day Serbia. Facing the river, a
group of about twenty dwellings of trapezoidal plan
were built in a technique resembling that used by
Homo erectus at Terra Amata, with a palisade of
branches on either side of the house leaning against
an inclined central ridge pole. Here the floors of the
huts were of packed earth plastered hard around a
central stone-lined hearth [9.5]. At Střelice, in the
Czech Republic, in the remains of a Neolithic settlement of about 6,500 years ago (4500 BCE) was
found a clay model of a rectangular house [9.6]. It
had straight, vertical walls and a double-pitched, or
gable, roof. The walls of the model suggest that actual houses may have had walls made of woven
wood mats covered with mud plaster, perhaps with
a roof of thatch. Fragments of a similar clay model
found at Ariuçd, Romania, are inscribed with curved
geometric patterns, suggesting that the houses may
have been painted.11 Remains of houses of this type
have been found at the Cucuteni Tripolye settlement at Hǎbǎşeşti, Romania. At Sittard, in what is
now the Netherlands, and at many other sites in
places such as Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine,
wood longhouses were built with substantial timber
frames, up to 260 feet (80 m) long, with walls and
inner partitions of wattle and daub (a basketwork of
172
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
9.4. Monte Verde dwellings plan, together with reconstructed view, Monte Verde site, Chile, c. 14,800 to 13,800 years ago.
Here the oldest yet-discovered organic dwelling fragments were found under a layer of peat that had sealed off oxygen, thus
preserving the fugitive wood and leather remains. Drawing: L. M. Roth after T. Dillehay, Monte Verde (Washington, DC,
1997); with conjectural perspective view from Scientific American, October, 1984, with permission.
sticks covered with clay plaster). Dating from
around 7,300 years ago (5300 BCE), these longhouses accommodated several families or perhaps
one extended family in each building.
Another village survived in remarkable detail,
covered by a lake at Biskupin, Poland, about 90 km
northeast of Poznań. Discovered during an extended drought in 1933 that lowered the water
level, the village had been built about 3,000 to
2,500 years ago (1000–500 BCE). More than one
hundred large oak and pine longhouses, with individual family chambers, about 26 × 33 ft (8 × 10
m) each, were arranged in rows on wood-paved
streets about 10 feet wide, all facing south. The entire village was enclosed within an oval-shaped protective log wall, with one entry protected by a
watchtower. Following extensive excavations by a
Polish team (1934–1936), followed by a German
team (1940–1942) and then again by Polish archaeologists (until 1974), the village has been rebuilt as an open-air museum12 [9.7].
The early development of a complex social
structure in these settled communities is suggested
by evidence of a division and specialization of labor.
Whether these groups were egalitarian or whether
ruling families emerged is difficult to tell, but the
structures that the communities built clearly reveal
a communal purpose and the ability to devote substantial energy to the building process. The community as a whole was no longer involved solely in
physical sustenance, so that a growing portion of
villagers’ energies could be directed at expressing,
in increasingly durable and symbolic ways, the values of the community.
173
9.5. Middle Stone Age village, Lepenski Vir, Serbia, c. 5200–4800 BP. Groups of such dwellings were built in terraces on
the banks of the Danube. The houses had trapezoidal plans, measuring from 8 to 11 feet lengthwise, and hard limestone
plaster floors, with central stone-lined hearths. From D. Srejović, New Discoveries at Lepenski Vir (New York, 1972).
9.6. Clay model of a house, Střelice (near Brno), Czech Republic, c. 4700 BP. From N. K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in
Europe (Harmondsworth, England, 1968).
174
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THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
9.7. View of the reconstructed village at Lake Biskupion, Poland, archaeological remains dated 1000–500 BCE. Because the
site was flooded with water for two millennia, the wood structural members did not disappear through decay. Photo: Ludek.
Connecting with the
Dead and the Cosmos
As Lewis Mumford noted: “Mid the uneasy wanderings of Paleolithic man, the dead were the first
to have a permanent dwelling: a cave, a mound
marked by a cairn, a collective barrow.”13 Since that
was written in the 1950s, new archaeological discoveries have proven Mumford perceptive beyond
even his most extreme projections. What Mumford
proposed was that the earliest permanent humanbuilt structures were not intended for individuals:
they were not houses for the chiefs in the villages
but, rather, communal undertakings—structures
that focused on shamanistic rituals or served as
places for the dead or even as devices for tracking
the course of time. While stone was not used in the
oldest solar observatory yet discovered, its antiquity
and that of the most ancient ritual temples recently
discovered have pushed our understanding of
human sacred construction back several millennia
from the Pyramids in Egypt or the stone megaliths
of Stonehenge.
The Göbekli Tepe Sanctuary (Southwestern Turkey).
It was once assumed that cities and the significant
religious structures within them did not arise until
after agriculture was developed and cattle, sheep,
and goats were domesticated; in other words, it
seemed impossible that hunter-gatherers in their nomadic movements could have engaged in significant
permanent building, much less the establishment of
fixed religious centers. Impossible, that is, until the
late 1990s, when intensive excavations were begun
at the Göbekli Tepe site in southeastern Turkey. Very
quickly it became clear from the material being unearthed that the highly unusual structures had been
built around 11,600 years ago (9600 BCE) and that,
in fact, the first work on the site had been started
another 2,000 years before that. It quickly became
known as the oldest temple site in the world [9.8 and
p. 162].
Excavation work is still ongoing, and the archaeologists caution that since less than 5 percent of the
total 22-acre site has been opened, the interpretations now emerging are incomplete; nevertheless,
the extremely early dates seem well established. The
geography in southeastern Turkey twelve millennia
ago was far more lush and rich with game animals
than the arid landscape of today; nomadic people
came together here at intervals and created a shrine
or sanctuary dedicated to the dead. They built using
Neolithic Dwellings and Structures 175
9.8. Temple structure, Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey, c. 9,600 BCE. Built as a group of several round ceremonial
structures (possibly temples), these buildings were abandoned and deliberately buried. Photo: © National Geographic Image
Collection/Alamy.
large T-shaped stone piers set in rings on bedrock or
a prepared hard floor, positioned radially like spokes,
each carved with various animal images including
foxes, lions, cattle, hyenas, wild boar, wild asses,
cranes, ducks, scorpions, spiders, phalluses, geometric patterns, and many snakes. These T-shaped pier
stones reach lengths of 23 feet (7 m) and weights of
11 to 22 tons (10 to 20 metric tons). Taken from
scattered quarry sites around the sanctuary complex,
the stones were moved as far as 1,640 feet (500 meters) away to construct six or more “temples” (perhaps as many as sixteen), ranging from 30 to 100 feet
in diameter. Estimates suggest that as many as five
hundred people worked here at times. What makes
this achievement astonishing is that it was accomplished over a span of three millennia, without metal
tools and before the wheel—the pier stones and
carvings shaped through a process of pounding stone
against stone. Even more curious, it seems that after
about 3,000 years of use the temples were deliberately backfilled with stone debris and bones. Apparently as towns appeared in the region about 9,500
years ago (see the discussion of Çatalhöyük below),
the purpose of the round temples faded away and accordingly they were deliberately closed. In defiance
of all conventional wisdom, it seems that at Göbekli
Tepe, as excavator Klaus Schmidt expressed it in the
title of his report on the subject: “First came the temple, then the city.”14
Nabta Playa (Southwestern Egypt). The desire to
understand the cycles of the sun led to the creation
of a solar and stellar “observatory” at a time much
earlier than was once supposed. It was found at a
surprising location, about 100 miles (160 km) east
of Abu Simbel on the Nile in southern Egypt, deep
in the interior of today’s nearly completely dry Nubian Desert. Toward the end of the last ice age,
however, around 12,000 years ago, weather patterns
shifted northward, lasting up to about 5,600 years
ago (4600 BCE). During this interval, summer monsoon rains brought as much as six inches of water
each year, creating an intermittent lake there. With
the water a seasonal verdant savannah existed, a
playa that supported extinct buffalo, large giraffes,
and varieties of antelope and gazelle. Evidence indicates that humans used that area 10,000 years
ago, first in nomadic groups and then, by 7,000 years
ago (5000 BCE), keeping numbers of wild cattle and
wild Barbary sheep in more permanent settlements.
Communities formed around deep wells, and houses
were built in straight lines using stone, though there
may still have been nomadic movement with the
cycle of the monsoon rains.
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9.9. Star observatory, Nabta Playa,
Egypt, 4,800–4,000 BCE. Stone slabs
removed from nearby exposed outcrops
were set upright at critical spots to mark
out alignments of sun positions and star
rising points. Drawing: L. M. Roth after
T. G. Brophy, The Origin Map . . .
(2002).
Over the centuries about thirty megalithic structures were built in the region, and particularly about
6,800 to 6,000 years ago (4800–4000 BCE) a sun
and star observatory was constructed among the villages [9.9]. Naturally occurring broken stone slabs
of sandstone from an exposed outcrop located over
a mile away were dragged to the site, some laid flat
and others set vertical in the earth. The observatory
consisted of a roughly 12-foot-diameter ring of
about thirty stones, with two pairs of vertical stone
slabs, one pair aligned with true north and the second pair arranged toward the summer solstice horizon, marking the time when the annual monsoons
started. Other alignments were made with separate
vertical stone slabs erected a mile or so distant;
these alignments were at that time oriented toward
Sirius (the brightest night star), Dubhe (the brightest star in Ursa Major), and stars in the belt of
Orion.15 By 4,800 years ago (2800 BCE), however,
the monsoons had shifted well to the south and the
Nubian Desert reemerged, with people abandoning
the Nabta, perhaps moving east to the dependable
water of the Nile.
The Goseck Circle (Germany). Far to the north, at
nearly the same time—roughly 6,900 years
ago (4900 BCE)—in the Burgenlandkreis district
in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, people built a very
similar construction for observing the mid-winter
solstice to mark the moment when the sun stopped
its southern movement and began its return north
with ever-lengthening days.16 Called today the
Goseck Circle, it was built of earth and wood; but
even after millennia of farming the overlying
ground, sufficient alteration remained in the soil to
show up in aerial photographs in 1991, leading to
painstaking excavation. This northern observatory
consisted of ditches dug in the earth in four concentric circles with an outer diameter of 246 feet
(75 m). Included in the centric rings were two parallel wood palisades opened up with three gates, one
pointing southwest, another pointing southeast, and
Western European Megaliths
the third pointing due north. Sometime after construction a moat was dug around the whole.
Western European Megaliths
While hides and wood timbers may have been suitable for dwellings and other utilitarian structures,
monumental architecture in stone was invented for
more symbolic ritual structures. Where typically one
or two individuals could put up a wood-framed and
hide -covered house in a day or two, now the efforts
of specialized workers began to be devoted to quarrying massive stone megaliths (from the Greek mega,
“great,” plus lithos, “stone”) and transporting them
to the building site; construction could take weeks,
months, years, even decades. Among the oldest of
these megalithic sites is the cluster of as many as two
hundred tombs (now reduced to around one hun-
177
dred) at Carrowmore, County Sligo, northern Ireland. Some archaeological evidence suggests that
building started as early as 7,400 years ago, but more
secure dating suggests 6,000 to 5,500 years ago
(4000–3500 BCE).
One type of megalithic construction was the
freestanding stone columns called menhirs (a Celtic
word meaning “long stone”), cut in large numbers
and erected vertically in circular patterns or parallel
rows, marking a spot for some ritual purpose whose
precise meaning is now lost to us. Such megalithic
arrangements, the most numerous of all ancient
stone constructions, appear across northern Europe, but the oldest are those of Brittany in northeastern France. There, at Carnac, are rows of stones
stretching 4 miles (6.4 km), some erected as early
as 6500, but most likely around 5,300 years ago
(4500–3300 BCE) [9.10]. Nearby, at Kerloas, is the
9.10. Aerial view of aligned stone uprights, Carnac, Brittany, France, c. 4700 BP and after. Over three thousand stones are
fixed upright in eleven rows, but the purpose of this building activity remains unknown. Photo: French Government Tourist
Office, New York.
178
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largest megalith still standing, 39 feet high (11.9 m),
but the biggest of them all was Le Grand Menhir,
today broken into five pieces but originally 70 feet
(21 m) long. Erected at Locmariaquer in Brittany,
it would have been visible for miles around the Bay
of Morbihan. The megalith was partly worked and
smoothed, of a granite not native to this area but
from central Brittany. Moving it and erecting it in
its present location was a considerable feat, considering that it would have weighed 345 tons. This was
clearly the work of sophisticated minds exercising
careful preparation and organization.
About 5,500 years ago (3500 BCE), a group of
temples was begun on the islands of Malta, in the
middle of the Mediterranean Sea. By 3,500 years
ago (1500 BCE), these sites were built over with the
temple ruins we see at Malta today. These Maltese
temples are spatially more complex than any of the
other buildings of the Neolithic period. One of the
temples, in fact, is carved into the limestone hill at
Hal Saflieni. Given the Greek name hypogeum, “cellar,” it was a catacomb for housing seven thousand
dead. On the Maltese island of Gozo is found the
temple complex called Ggantija, Maltese for “gigantic.” [9.11]. Somewhat similar to many of the thirty
other Maltese temples, this complex was built in
stages, with connected clusters of rounded rooms
defined by parallel walls of large, limestone facingblocks, the space between them filled with stone
rubble and earth. The inner walls were partially finished in more carefully cut blocks of a deep-yellow
limestone, some carved with spirals and other curvi-
9.11. Temple complex called Ggantija, Malta, c. 4200–2900 BP. This is only one of many buildings in stone on the Maltese
islands, built over several centuries, apparently as religious centers. Drawing: L. M. Roth.
Western European Megaliths
179
9.12. Lanyon Quoit, Cornwall, England, c. 3200 BP. Originally covered by great mounds of soil, such stone structures seem
to have been burial chambers (judging from the few artifacts found in some examples). Photo: Visual Resources Collection,
Architecture & Allied Arts, University of Oregon.
linear patterns. Massive superimposed stone lintels,
carried on huge vertical jamb stones on either side,
form the door to the Hagar Qim temple on the island of Malta, the world’s oldest monumental entrance. What the upper structure of these temples
may have been is not clear, but beams and rafters of
wood may have formed the roofs.
In northern Europe, the roofed tomb structures
are known as dolmens (Celtic for “table stones”)
and consisted of at least three vertical stone slabs
supporting a massive horizontal roof slab or boulder
[9.12]. This type is found at the Carrowmore site
noted earlier; Lanyon Quoit is located in Cornwall,
England. Originally each dolmen was covered with
a mound of earth, which has long since eroded
away. In some cases, four large, roughly rectangular
slabs make up the base, forming something like a
gigantic stone box, with an immense stone lid.
Sometimes these dolmens were extended, with a
series of stone slabs forming two parallel walls that
were capped with numerous roof slabs, all covered
with earth. These long barrows were gallery graves,
with a series of bodies placed in the extended
chamber. In several locations, the barrows ended
in a roughly circular chamber roofed with small
stones laid in rings that closed in as they rose, each
stone cantilevered over the one below, forming a
corbeled vault.
One of the most impressive of these passage
graves, the New Grange tomb near Dublin, Ireland,
has survived nearly intact in the core of a huge
earthen mound. Begun about 5,200 to 5,000 years
ago (3200–3000 BCE), the tomb is one of three
huge mounds found about 16 miles (25.7 km) up
the River Boyne from its mouth at Drogheda.
Within the mound, which measures variously 260
to 280 feet (79 to 85 m) in diameter, is a long rising
entrance passage, roughly 60 feet (19 m) in length,
leading to a corbel-domed, cruciform (three-lobed)
inner chamber [9.13]. The tomb is carefully oriented to the southeast, with its entrance partially
but precisely blocked by an external curbstone. The
components of the passage are aligned in such a
way that once a year, on the morning of the winter
solstice, at 9:58 a.m. local time, a beam of sunlight
penetrates all the way to the back of the passage,
striking the rear wall of the central “apse.” For
twenty-one minutes, the beam slowly sweeps across
the rear wall and then darkness falls for another
year. Only on that one day, of all the days of the
year, does the sun reach into the depths of the
tomb. When the tomb was completed, it was sealed
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THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
9.13. New Grange tomb,
Boyne Valley, near Dublin,
Ireland, c. 3200–3000 BCE.
The entry passage of this grave
was so positioned and curved
upward that at the rise of
the winter solstice in late
December—and on that day
only—the first rays of the sun
would penetrate the depths of
the tomb for about twenty-one
minutes. Drawing: L. M. Roth.
at the entrance, leaving only a narrow slit open at
the top, so that thereafter, the opening for the shaft
of solstice light served as a “channel of communication” between the living outside and dead within.
Stonehenge
Of all the prehistoric megalithic constructions, certainly the best known is Stonehenge, on the chalk
downs of Salisbury Plain, not far from Salisbury, England. Strictly speaking, there are three consecutive
Stonehenges at this location, for the complex was
built in three major stages over a period of more
than 1,200 years, not by one group of people but by
successive generations living in the area. The first
stage consisted of marking out the location, sometime around 5,100–5,050 years ago (3100–3050
BCE). By means of a leather thong or a woven rope
160 feet (48.8 m) long affixed to a central stake, a
circle was drawn 320 feet (97.5 m) in diameter. A
circular trench was dug into the white chalk, with
the chips piled up on the inside, creating an inner
wall originally about 6 feet (1.8 m) high. An opening was left at the northeast side and a large menhir, the heelstone, was erected just outside the
entrance. In addition, fifty-six holes were excavated
just inside the embankment for the placement of
wood posts, creating a “woodhenge.”
Then, between 4,100 and 4,075 years ago
(2100–2075 BCE), in the second phase of construction, a crescent of blue stone uprights was
erected inside the circle, including a large upright
stone aligned with two others outside the entrance
near the heelstone. The blue stones are of special
significance, since they could only have come from
the Prescelli Mountains in Pembroke, southwestern
Wales, nearly 245 miles (380 km) away. It seems
most likely that they were dragged from the quarry
to what is now Milford Haven in Wales, and then
moved by sea to the vicinity of Bristol, on the Avon
River; from there the stones were hauled overland
to the plain of Salisbury and then along a long,
curved causeway or avenue to the site.
The third and last phase of Stonehenge created
the complex we are familiar with today. The building
phase started as early as 2000 BCE and was finished
by 1500 BCE [9.14 and 19.15, p. 164]. The blue
stones were temporarily removed, and immense
sandstone sarsens or stone uprights (quarried in
Marlborough Downs about 20 miles [16.1 km] away)
were raised to form a circular colonnade 20 feet (6 m)
high, with curved lintels. Within the enclosure were
erected five even larger trilithons (two uprights carrying a lintel) enclosing a horseshoe that opens toward the heelstone to the northeast [p. 6]. It was a
prodigious effort, requiring the labor of roughly 1,100
Western European Megaliths
181
9.14. Stonehenge III, Salisbury plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2000–1500 BCE. The present Stonehenge is simply the last of
three distinct building phases carried out over almost one and a half thousand years. Photo: Aerofilms, London.
laborers over a period of seven weeks to move each
individual stone from quarry to building site, not to
mention the stonecutters at work in the quarry and
the finishers carrying out the final dressing of the
monoliths at the site. Each upright had to be tilted,
in small increments, perhaps supported by wooden
towers or cribs of crossed logs until it slid into its waiting hole and then was made properly plumb. The lintels were likely levered up on similar log cribs and
moved sideways into place. The stone surfaces may
appear to us rough compared to contemporaneous
work in Egypt or Greece, but this was not the handiwork of primitive people. Building Stonehenge required detailed social organization and cooperation
of a high order over an extended period.
Yet the essential question remains: What was it
for? The effort of many generations, extended over
so many centuries, was undertaken for some compelling purpose. As recent investigations suggest,
this complex served as an astronomical observatory,
for the alignment of the heelstone with the stones
in the center of the circle is such that at the summer
solstice, about 4,000 years ago, the sun would have
risen directly over the heelstone, as viewed from
the center of the trilithons. Other alignments within
the complex suggest that Stonehenge might have
been used to mark phases and eclipses of the moon
and other astronomical phenomena. But, as archaeological evidence of a similar enormous, round
structure—this one made of wood—just 2 miles
182
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
(3.2 km) away makes clear, the same results could
have been achieved with much less effort. Stonehenge may indeed have served such an astronomical function, but it was built with such care and
expenditure of labor that it also became a tribal expression of identity, the physical manifestation of a
social covenant, a symbol of communal purpose. It
was a gathering place where each year the recurring
cycle of the sun and of life was celebrated by the assembled people.
A Neolithic Village: Skara Brae
The prodigious effort involved in building in stone
seems to have been expended only on structures for
the dead and on sacred monuments. The houses of
the workers who built the dolmens, the barrows,
and Stonehenge were most likely made of timbers,
hides, and thatch and have long since disappeared.
We do have the remarkable survival of at least one
village, however, dating from about 5,200 years ago
(3200 BCE) and abandoned about 4,200 years ago
(2200 BCE). Portions of the village remain only be-
cause it was built almost entirely of stone owing to
the absence of locally available wood. Skara Brae,
located in the forbiddingly harsh and stony Orkney
Islands north of Scotland, was revealed by accident
after a lashing storm in 1850 blew off the sand that
had covered the village for more than 3,000 years
(it had most likely been buried by just such a storm).
Because there is virtually no wood on the islands,
the houses were built almost entirely of stone, with
stone shelving, tables, and beds. Hence, they were
preserved from decay, affording us an intimate
glimpse of how life was lived in northern Neolithic
Britain [9.16, 9.17]. There were ten houses in all,
with narrow alleys winding between them. When
the site was excavated, the walls were partially collapsed, but judging by the whale bones found in the
dwellings, the roofs may have been of hides or
thatch supported by rafters made of whale bones.
From Villages to Cities
The deliberate cultivation of collected grains began
in southern Egypt as early as 19,000 to 12,000 years
9.16. Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, off Scotland, c. 3200–2200 BCE. In this forbiddingly harsh climate there is little wood,
so almost all parts of the houses were made of stone and thus have been preserved. Drawing: David Rabbitt.
From Villages to Cities
183
9.17. Skara Brae. View into one of the dwellings. Photo: Courtesy, Marian Card Donnelly.
ago, as evidenced by the well-used grinding stones
found there. By 10,000 years ago, agriculture had
been firmly established in what is called the Fertile
Crescent—the area along the valley of the Nile, up
the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, across what
is now southeastern Turkey, and down the valleys of
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Once this Neolithic
period, or what the historian V. Gordon Childe
called the “Neolithic revolution,”17 had begun, the
patterns of human activity were profoundly changed.
Examination of sites uncovered since the 1930s and
1940s suggests that formation of permanent settled
communities in fact predated the development of
agriculture, meaning that profound changes were occurring in how human beings thought about and
cared for each other, and how they wished to live
together. Bulky stone tools were replaced by implements with small cutting pieces of volcanic glass—
obsidian—fitted into wood or bone armatures,
allowing for easy replacement of broken or dull cutting segments. The most sweeping social changes
grew directly out of the development of agriculture.
No longer spending their lives moving cyclically with
the rhythms of nature, people now resided in rela-
tively fixed settlements, close to the planted fields.
This encouraged more substantial buildings, and as
villages, towns, and cities grew in size, social organization became more complex, requiring varied building types. Modern civilization has added very few
new basic building types to those that arose from the
needs created in Neolithic times—houses, storage
facilities, governmental and civic buildings, and religious shrines. Only in the areas of mechanized
transport have wholly new building types been developed just in the last two centuries.
Çatalhöyük (Southwest Turkey)
Large, permanently inhabited cities appeared at
almost the same geological moment the glaciers retreated. Remains of the earliest stone-built communities have emerged in modern-day Turkey, Israel,
and Jordan, dating back as much as 14,000 years
ago. Archaeological excavations down through the
mound of the ancient city of Jericho in Israel have
shown that this was an established city as early as
11,000 years ago. Our most detailed understanding
of how a Neolithic city functioned, however, comes
184
9.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM CAVES TO CITIES
from the successive layers of the well-preserved
town of Çatalhöyük, a city built next to the Çarsamba River on the Konya Plain of south-central
Turkey. Settled by at least 9,500 years ago (7500
BCE), this city had perhaps eight thousand residents a thousand years later. Despite being miles
from the fields, the town was built on a mound in
the midst of marshes that provided a good grade of
clay used everywhere to plaster walls and floors.
Çatalhöyük was not only a farming community but
also a vital link in the trade network that transported highly prized obsidian from the northern volcanic areas to cities throughout the Fertile Crescent
of Palestine and Mesopotamia. But besides obsidian
and the Neolithic technology that this material implies, implements of copper and lead were found at
Çatalhöyük, hinting at the beginnings of the Bronze
Age.
Çatalhöyük covered an area of 32 acres (12.9
hectares), of which about a quarter was excavated
during 1961–1966, an area that turned out to be a
residential quarter. Excavation was resumed in
earnest in 1993.18 There were no streets as such
through the town, but tightly clustered rectangular
houses instead, with an occasional courtyard between them that served as a rubbish dump [9.18].
Entry to each house was by means of a hole in the
roof that also served as the vent for the smoke of
the central hearth. The residences were built with
timber frames, the panels between the posts and
beams filled with mud brick, plastered, and often
painted. In one house, a wall was painted with a
landscape of the view toward the volcanic mountains in the distance, with a plan of the city depicted in the foreground; in another house were
painted figures of dancers. It is interesting that
nearly a quarter of the chambers excavated by 1966
had shrines devoted to a mother goddess and a bull
cult, though subsequent excavation indicates no
particular emphasis on a mother goddess.
Çatalhöyük was only one of scores of similar small
cities that flourished in the area of Palestine, southern central Turkey, and modern Iraq. Particularly old,
however, was the town now known as Abu Hureyra,
on the Euphrates in present-day Syria (the site is now
flooded). From a small settlement whose establishment dates to around 13,000 years ago, there developed a larger community by 11,000 to 9,000 years
9.18. View of Level I, Çatalhöyük, Turkey, c. 7500 BCE. The houses were packed tightly together, with no streets; access to
the dwellings was through openings in the roof. From J. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük (New York, 1967).
The Invention of Architecture 185
ago. Evidence suggests a clear transition from hunting to the consumption of cultivated grains during
this period. Another town was Çayönü, near Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey, which was occupied
as early as 9,250 years ago (7250 BCE). Over several
centuries, its inhabitants, similar to those in many
other locations, gradually made a transition from
consuming wild animals to raising domesticated animals and from using stone to forging copper to make
small tools. Another village was ‘Ain Ghazal, in modern Jordan, also settled as early as 9,250 years ago
with a population of perhaps two thousand people.
Yet another small city is today called Jarmo, east of
present-day Kirkut in northeastern Iraq. Jarmo flourished about 9,000 years ago but probably never had
more than twenty-five houses, with a population of
perhaps 150 people.
Areas with population figures ranging from 150
to 10,000 inhabitants may seem like small villages
today, not cities in modern terms. Use of the words
city and urban, however, connotes not simply a large
congregation of people but the rise of a complex social system. In this communal structure, numerous
essential tasks are taken up by specific individuals
so that no one exists in isolation whereas, together,
people provide services for each other. These services include tasks that make a comfortable city life
possible—growing food, managing irrigation, producing bread, making clay pots for storage, smelting
copper or making bronze and fashioning tools, tending to ritual observances, maintaining shrines, and
building houses—in short, all the myriad activities
that make city living possible. By 6,000 years ago
(4000 BCE), however, as economic and agricultural
conditions changed, and with the surrounding fields
presumably exhausted, cities like Çatalhöyük were
gradually abandoned. But the crucial first steps in
living together in settled communities had been
taken. As Michael Balter notes, “nearly everything
that came afterward, including organized religion,
writing, cities, social inequality, population explosions, traffic jams, mobile phones, and the Internet,
has roots in the moment that people decided to live
together in communities. And once they did so, as
Çatalhöyük indicates, there was no turning back.”19
The next steps in the formation of a truly urban
culture would take place in the region watered by
the Tigris and the Euphrates, the land between the
rivers: Mesopotamia.
The Invention of Architecture
Once human precursors had developed techniques
for hunting and had mastered the control of fire,
they began to leave their African savanna homeland
in an exodus that would take them to central and
far-eastern Asia, as well as into Europe. As they left
the benign climate of the lower latitudes for the
more challenging northerly exposures, and as the ice
ages made Europe a cold, forbidding place, the need
for finding or making shelter became urgent. The
first human-crafted (or, we could say, hominidcrafted) shelters were made, and architecture had
begun. As modern human beings moved into Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, structures that
were more developed were crafted, and, with the
growing division and specialization of labor—not to
mention the emergence of increasingly complex,
centralized social organizations—energy could be
devoted to fashioning more permanent structures
of stone for ceremonial purposes and ritual celebrations. The next step was an increased concentration
of peoples in towns that grew into cities. Monumental architecture had begun.